Thursday, 21 May 2015

M. Hulot's Holiday (Les Vacances de M. Hulot) (1953)

Festlige Feriedage

Long before
”The Artist” Jacques Tati made his own tribute to the silent comedy. Or more
specifically to Charles Chaplin. That reference is never far away when you
watch “Les Vacances de M. Hulot”. Jacques Tati himself is a Chaplin-like
character, Monsieur Hulot, whose well-meaning clumsiness causes all sorts of
mishaps and trouble and this in an environment that is straight out of a
Chaplin universe. There is no real dialogue in the movie, but a sound
background similar to what Chaplin used in “City Lights” and “Modern Times”.
Yes, people are talking, but none of it is consequential and the movie is
essentially silent.

Apparently
this film exist in both a French and English version and at first I was
disappointed to find out that I got the English version, but I soon realized
that that mattered not. French or English, the voices only set the mood and
even in the English version there is a great deal of French, representing the
variety of holiday makers on the beach.

All the
comedy is physical, completely in line with Chaplin’s concept and mostly it is
instigated by the Hulot character. This in turn means that everything depends on
Tati’s own performance and whether or not Hulot as a character is funny.

Fortunately
he is. At least most of the time.

The story
is almost absent. Instead the movie is a series of tableaux centered on
Monsieur Hulot’s holiday on the beach. He arrives in his silly little car,
messes up everything and finally leaves. So much for a synopsis. His holiday
takes place in a small seaside village, which I at first thought would be in
Normandy (the train station is Caen), but it later turns out it is
Saint-Marc-sur-Mer near St. Nazaire. Never mind. It is the kind of place with a
single beach hotel, where all the guests eat their meals together, hang out in
the lobby and go on picnic together. Almost like a modern day school trip. The
guests are different representatives of the middle class who despite their
different nationality and civil life have that in common that they are fairly
new at this sort of vacation but tries to uphold a tradition seen as upper
class. That makes it all rather stiff and pretentious, borderline ridiculous
and into this world enter the walking disaster Monsieur Hulot.

Hulot is
very polite, very insecure and very clumsy. He often has little idea of the
trouble he causes and the figure he makes and when he does notice he is so
eager to fix things that he just makes them far worse. The comedy is in the way
he moves, his facial expressions, his poor timing or, in some case,
exceptionally good timing. Mostly his seemingly harmless quirks triggers events
that always gets far worse than he deserve. Like when he gently moves a card
player to reach a ping-pong ball so the player plays his card on the wrong
table causing both tables to erupt in fury at the unfortunate card player.

To a modern
viewer the pace is a little too slow. Chaplin at his greatest was better at
that timing, not to mention Keaton, but it is compensated by the subtleness of
many of the jokes. Of course there are a lot of very obvious gags: people
falling, things breaking, his silly car and so on, but “Les Vacances de M.
Hulot” is best when it is subtle. The replacement tire with leaves stuck to it
that is mistaken for a funeral decoration, only to let out air as the mourners
pass as if they were farting, or the English (I presume) middle, but wannabe
upper class, couple led on by the enthusiastic, but oblivious wife, always
keeping her husband in tow. At the end when everybody seem ready to denounce
Hulot, he alone thanks Hulot for saving his otherwise miserable vacation. The
small gestures are everywhere. The head waiter’s quiet exasperation, the wonder
of the older woman who takes a liking to Hulot, the children, who for once are
not a menace to the movie, but seem to be utterly in the way of the propriety
of guests and hosts at the hotel.

This is the
movie that made Tati and he went on to make several very successful movies,
though, as I understand it, rarely featuring himself as Hulot. “Mon Oncle” is
the only one I could find (Maybe “Trafic”?). That is actually a shame. I could
easily see his Hulot character become a franchise: M. Hulot in the army, M.
Hulot gets a job, M. Hulot wins in the lottery. As Chaplin did or Chevy Chase
with the National Lampoon. The most obvious descendent of Hulot however is
Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean franchise. I feel almost certain I have watched an
episode or maybe a combination of episodes copying “Les Vacances de M. Hulot”.
I like Mr. Bean (or even better Blackadder, but that is another story), but he
harks back to Tati, which in turn tried to emulate the great Charles Chaplin. This
format has a long history.

“Les
Vacences de M. Hulot” gets a solid recommendation from me. It was fun to watch
and never boring. It is great to see physical comedy done well and as a little
bonus we get a musical riff that set the tone for summer vacation scenes in
movies for next two decades.

I like this one but my very favorite is Mon Oncle. The think I like best about Tati is that his films repay reviewing. There is an amazing amount of stuff going on at any one time and it takes at least a couple of viewings to catch it all.

I recently received the new Tati Criterion box set and am happily working my way back through his films. From my first go around, I also prefer Mon Oncle - though i appreciate Playtime on a technical level.

After watching the three Tati films on the 1,001 Movies list I came to the conclusion that I like him better as a director than as an actor. I tend to like the scenes that don't focus on him more than the ones where he's front and center.

Disclaimer on spoilers

If you have not seen these movies yet you may want to skip out on reading these commentaries. I am rarely holding back from revealing details from the movies that a proper review would hide under a spoiler tag. The reason is that these are not really reviews, but just my comments on the movies and some of the details which are most interesting to comment on are exactly the parts which will spoil the surprise if you have not seen it yet. So be warned.

About Me

In 2010 I started the project of gathering and seeing the 1001 movies listed in "1001 movies to see before you die". This is a blog to allow me to comment on them.
I am married with a son and geologist by training. Since 99 I have worked as a wind engineer at EMD (www.emd.dk) where I mostly work with wind studies and noise.